Posts
Amazon, Apple, Google, Zigbee Alliance and board members form working group to develop open standard for smart home devices
25
@vlemon
·0 views
2 min read
Amazon, Apple, Google, Zigbee Alliance and board members form working group to develop open standard for smart home devices (Company press release)
- Amazon, Apple, and Google have announced plans to develop a common technology standard for smart home products in order to enable more connected devices to communicate with each other.
- The three companies will work with the Zigbee Alliance with the aim to facilitate the development of devices that are compatible with smart home and voice services such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, and others.
Analysis and Comments
This is significant news for a number of reasons – the most obvious being that the three rivals are three of the biggest smart home and voice assistant providers and thus control a large part of the fragmented market.**
- The Zigbee Alliance is a foundation that promotes standards for the Internet of Things (IoT) with members including Samsung Electronics, Somfy, and Ikea.
- Importantly, lack of interoperability and industry-wide connectivity standards is among the top headwinds of a more widespread adoption of smart home ecosystems. For consumers, this would increase choice and flexibility, given they could ultimately choose their preferred voice assistants on the standardised devices. For developers, it would simplify product development as well as reduce costs since they would not be paying royalties for connectivity software.
- However, the other major headwind – privacy and security questions – remains and will arguably be the biggest concern critics of this initiative will raise. This is because bringing more devices together in a home raises the prospect of personal data being shared with a higher number of companies (all with varying security and privacy standards).
It is worth noting that the new initiative does not include any of the major Asian smart home companies** (i.e. Baidu, Alibaba’s Tmall, and Xiaomi), which is probably not surprising though given the trade tensions between China and the US would complicate such partnerships and Google/Amazon have less of a presence for smart speakers in the region.
